El Cerrito Democratic Club – Page 59 – Giving Voice to Progressive Democrats for Over 60 Years

August 25, 2017August 25, 2017

August 22, 2017 Meeting Recap

Speaker, Robert Cheasty of Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP) on the Urgency of Global Warming in and for the Bay Area

Robert Cheasty is the Executive Director of CESP, CESP’s former President, and a founding member, whose 25 year effort was crucial to establishment of the Eastshore State Park in 2002. CESP’s mission is to create shoreline parks from the Oakland Estuary to the Carquinez Strait, working to protect open space through advocacy, outreach and education. (https://eastshorepark.org)

Known for his community activism, Cheasty served as President of the Bay Dredging Action Coalition, an organization dedicated to ecologically sound and efficient dredging operations in San Francisco Bay. He has also served as Mayor of Albany and held numerous other public positions. Professionally, he heads a Berkeley law firm specializing in civil litigation that successfully litigated against the city of Richmond.

The Environmental and Economic Dangers

Displaying a poster of what a 2-meter rise in sea level would look like for the East Bay shores, Cheasty noted that there would be catastrophic effects: loss of access to major bridges and highways traversing the Bay; much of the East Bay shoreline underwater, including the Oakland airport and the city of Alameda; damage to the ports of Richmond and Oakland; and the loss of shoreline walkways and habitat. The key, he said, was what we need to do now to prevent this from happening.

A Resilient Shoreline

There are simple protections, Cheasty said, but they take time, and activist groups like the ECDC must be involved. The work includes raising awareness about the sea-level rise to be caused by climate change; organizing a coalition of public leaders in support of green infrastructure solutions (e.g. restored marshes that form a critical buffer zone and horizontal levees) rather than hardscape solutions (e.g. sea walls); and engaging the public in visualizing what such a sea-level increment would look like. This combination of effort will move people to action.

Lack of Federal Funds for cities proposing shoreline development

Subsidy of the US Army Corps of Engineers to establish a resilient shoreline is “not baked into” the Federal budget; and there will be stiff competition for funding from NYC, Boston, Chesapeake Bay, Florida, and the Gulf Coast. Such remediation does have strong support from elected officials (Skinner, Thurmond, Bay Area mayors, and Governor Brown), but it is critical that people show their elected representatives that they care about protecting our shoreline. Some cities are doing the opposite of what is smart and planning for port and housing development in the 500 to 1,000 foot depth of shoreline that would be better reserved as open space to mitigate sea rise.

Cheasty asked ECDC members to attend the next CESP event, the Richmond Shoreline Park Festival at Point Pinole Park on Saturday, Oct. 7 from ~1 to 4pm, to show support for creating a tolerant and sustainable shoreline that is open to the public, that provides beneficial habitat, and that buffers against the damage that will be caused by rising sea levels and flooding.
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Budget Amendment Passes

Members unanimously approved a $500 enhancement to the budget, as recommended by the Executive Board, to fund membership recruiting events.
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Standing Rule F Waived for This Year Only

Members unanimously approved a waiver, for 2017 only, to the standing rule that formerly required the vote on delegates for endorsement to be held at our September meeting. We don’t yet know how many endorsement slots we will have nor how many people will be running, and with each candidate given two minutes to speak, the time requirement will be substantial. September’s meeting, our perennially popular Back to School Night, will have a packed agenda and certainly not allow time for selection of delegates. See Hilary Crosby’s August 17th posting, “Proposed Standing Rule Change: Meaning, Background, Impact,” for additional information.
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Three Officer Positions Vacant as of 2018

VP-Publications, VP-Records and VP-Membership all have openings for 2018. We hope that every ECDC member will think about volunteering to help us get through a busy election year.
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November meeting discussion of Young Dem seat on E-Board

After discussion, the Board agreed that at our November 28 meeting the membership will entertain the idea of granting a seat on the Board to a member of the California Young Democrats, on terms yet to be decided. The Board believes that more participation by Young Dems is necessary to our future success as a club, and that younger members will add important skills – such as canvassing and social media – to our arsenal to help Dems win in 2020.

August 17, 2017August 17, 2017

PROPOSED STANDING RULE CHANGE:
MEANING, BACKGROUND, IMPACT

As President Chau stated in his August 11 post, at the next meeting the membership may vote on a proposed change to our Club’s Standing Rule F, governing the timing of endorsements. This article attempts to explain why such a change is needed and why it might be desirable.

What is this about anyway?

The process that the California Democratic Party uses to endorse Democratic candidates in the primary elections for State Assembly, State Senate, and Congress begins with local pre-endorsing caucuses. The CDP endorsements for statewide offices – Governor, Treasurer, etc. – as well as for Senators and Board of Equalization are made by the delegates to the CDP Convention in the even-numbered years. The CDP follows the Democratic National Committee nomination for President.

All delegates to the CDP, as well as representatives from chartered Democratic Clubs, who live in a district can participate in its endorsement caucus. In order to vote, club representatives must be registered as Democrats or Democratic Party Preference in the district of the election they are voting in. For example, voters registered in El Cerrito are in Assembly District 15, State Senate District 9, and Congressional District 11.

In 2018 our current Assemblymember, Tony Thurmond, is running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, leaving his Assembly seat vacant. As I write this, there are six people running for this seat, and we can expect a lively endorsement process as those candidates, plus whoever else decides to run, lobbies delegates and club representatives to try to recruit enough support to get 60% of the vote as is required to snag the CDP endorsement.

As of this writing, Congressman Mark DeSaulnier has made no announcement of his retirement; since he is a very popular incumbent as well as a staunch progressive, he is not likely to face a Democratic opponent. Senator Nancy Skinner was elected to a four-year term in 2016, so there will not be an endorsement in Senate District 9 in 2018.

The CDP Convention will take place in San Diego over the last weekend in February, 2018; the endorsing caucus meetings will take place around the state during the last weekend in January. Absentee voting is permitted for endorsement; proxy voting is not. Absentee ballots must be provided to the Regional Director convening the endorsement meeting before the candidates for each office make their public statement. We are in Region 5, and our regional director (RD) is Rocky Fernandez. He came to our club in April and introduced himself and asked for our support. (The CDP has divided the state into 20 regions of 4 Assembly Districts each; the regional directors are elected by the delegates at conventions during even-numbered years.)

The actual voting is by roll call, with each voter announcing his or her vote to those present for the meeting; the RD reads the absentee ballots aloud. The votes are tallied by hand on a blackboard or butcher paper visible to all attendees as the vote progresses.

The endorsement made at the local caucus meetings gets ratified at the CDP Convention. If no candidate reaches the 60% threshold required for endorsement, or if an opponent of the candidate endorsed in the local caucus goes through the process of disputing the local endorsement (which requires signature gathering and other steps), the convention delegates may make an endorsement that is different from the results of the local voters. That happened in our district in 2014 when neither Thurmond nor Elizabeth Echols received the enough votes to get the local endorsement, but Echols was able to muster the required number of votes from the smaller pool of delegate voters at the CDP Convention.

Background

As a chartered Democratic Club, the ECDC has participated in these pre-endorsement caucuses. Our practice had been for the club president to recruit people to vote at the endorsing caucus. Because the vote was public, we were often not able to recruit as many people as we had slots. As more of our Club members participate in the Contra Costa County Democratic Party central committee and in the Assembly District Election Meetings and become delegates, our pool of possible recruits got smaller. For instance, currently half of our executive board members are also delegates to the CDP convention and as such already could cast votes at the pre-endorsement caucus.

In 2016 we had a very contested Senate race in which Nancy Skinner faced Sandre Swanson. Prior to the pre-endorsement caucus, we had not endorsed either candidate, and the people who had agreed to be our delegates were prepared to vote their personal preference. However, one of our 2016 members made the point that club members had had no opportunity to weigh in on either the selection of pre-endorsing delegates, or to advise those delegates to vote “no endorsement” to reflect the Club’s lack of solid support for either candidate.

In response to that point, the 2016 executive board proposed a change to the standing rules – which the membership approved – to elect our delegates to the pre-endorsement caucus in September of odd-numbered years. However, our September meeting agenda is already packed since September is our “Back to School” meeting (and we have our new WCCUSD Superintendent coming!) Also, at our regional meeting held on August 11, RD Fernandez announced that he will not have the final delegate counts for each club ready by then. Therefore, we are proposing that we postpone that vote until the November meeting, by which time we will have a better handle on how many seats we will have, and our members will have had time to consider whether or not to run.